Five Forecasts of China's IT Market in the Next Three Years

Recalling the development of the IT industry this year, Gartner has made the following preconditions for the development of the IT market in the next three years:

In 2013, Lenovo will become China's top smart phone supplier

Lenovo is the world's leading PC manufacturer, and the company's mobile phone business has also made great progress in the Chinese market. Compared with the 1.7% market share in the third quarter of 2011, its market share in smart phones increased to 14.8% in the third quarter of 2012, making it the leader in Apple (6.9%) and second only to Samsung (16.7%). The second largest smartphone brand. In China, Lenovo is the only local company that can compete with top international brands. This is mainly due to the company’s local brand awareness, distribution network throughout the country, strong product mix and reasonable pricing.

Lenovo positioned the brand as a medium- and low-end user, which is the biggest driving force for its future growth, and it is also a part of the lack of international brands. At the same time, better branding and distribution will enable Lenovo to gain more shares from local competitors in the open market. All of these factors will help Lenovo become China's top supplier of smart phones, despite its inevitable challenges in the development process.

In 2014, at least three personal cloud service providers will extend the service to TV

Today, many personal cloud services provide content access between computing devices, including personal computers, mobile phones, and tablets. Some equipment vendors also implement content sharing between televisions and mobile devices through applications and WiFi, but such services are often limited to different brands of the same brand and do not utilize the cloud. Personal cloud services will break this limitation and truly enable content access and sharing between different brands of devices. Gartner expects that by 2014, at least three providers will expand services to television sets. Going forward, providers will look for new areas for differentiation, and supporting televisions will be one of them. At the same time, this can also improve the user experience by allowing them to suspend the use of one device and continue to use the other device. In the future, this can also surpass media content, allowing users to make phone calls, read emails, and respond to messages over TVs without a computing device.

In 2016, shipments of tablet PCs will be equivalent to mobile PC shipments in the Chinese market.

In the Chinese market, the price of tablet computers is becoming very close to the people. Gartner predicts that the average price of tablets in the Chinese market will drop from 262 US dollars in 2011 to 176 US dollars in 2016. This drop in price will make tablets more intimate and become more personal devices than mobile PCs. Therefore, shipments of tablet PCs will eventually be equal to mobile PC shipments. Gartner predicts that by 2016, shipments of tablet PCs in the Chinese market will reach 57 million units, which is very close to the shipment of mobile PCs of 58 million units. The application of tablet computers is not limited to the consumer market, and many different vertical markets have also shown rising demand for this product, including hotels, insurance, finance, retail transportation, education and so on.

In 2016, 70% of x86 enterprise servers will be virtualized, 30% of which will use HVD workloads

Currently, 60% of global x86 enterprise server workloads are virtualized, and China will follow this model. In this market, virtualization of x86 workloads will increase from around 10% today to 70% in 2016. Similar to the global trend, China's server virtualization market growth is mainly driven by factors such as data center energy conservation, reduced floor space, server utility, and private cloud development. In the next few years, the growth of hosted virtual desktop workloads will exceed that of other server workloads. The growth of the server virtualization and hosted virtual desktop market will provide great opportunities for virtual technology providers, system integrators, and private cloud service providers, especially those who have established local businesses in China and can already provide services.

In 2016, at least 70% of public cloud service providers with government financial support will be eliminated in the market

The 12th five-year plan of the Chinese government has listed public cloud computing as a national-level strategic technology, and has encouraged investment in this area through direct investment or policy incentives such as tax incentives in the past five years. About 10 provincial governments will build 30 large-scale data centers, each covering over 1,000 square meters, to support enterprises in providing local public cloud services. In the short term, many government-involved public cloud computing service data centers will be launched one after another, but most of them will not be profitable and will be eliminated by the market before they are able to achieve development. Those successful suppliers will have the opportunity to present a profitable business model or an innovative differentiated field.

The government should have more rigorous inspection mechanisms for its service capabilities, innovation capabilities, and business models when it chooses to support service providers.